How many nuclear bombs would it take to destroy the Earth?

Let's start with pinup model Sabina Kelley.

The Helsinki International Film Festival was showing a movie about Grant Morrison, and the Finnish-language blurb mentions that Morrison "grew up in Scotland, near an army base holding enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world 50 times over".

I haven't seen the movie, and from the blurb I can't tell what "army base" they're talking about. Given that (as near as I can tell) neither V-bombers, British ballistic nuclear missiles nor US SAC aircraft were based in Scotland at the time, The most reasonable guess would be Faslane, home to the Royal Navy's nuclear submarines.

In the late '60s, Faslane became home to the Royal Navy's four Resolution class ballistic missile submarines. They each carried 16 Polaris A3 missiles, each carrying three 200kt independently-targeted warheads. So, 48 warheads at 200 kilotons each makes 9.6 megatons per submarine, and 38.4 megatons of total destructive power.

In other words, the total nuclear destructive power housed in a single Resolute clas ssubmarine was less than the 50-megaton yield of the Tsar Bomba, or less than two SS-18 Mod 2 warheads. The four submarines combined carried 192 200kt warheads; hardly enough to destroy the entire world even once. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were even enough to destroy the entire surface of Scotland.

Scotland has a total land area of 78,772 km2; according to a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would take approximately 250 one-megaton nuclear warheads to destroy it. So late 60's Faslane didn't even hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy Scotland completely, let alone the world.

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The notion that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over gets thrown around constantly, even at fairly high levels of government; last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said of the US and Russia that "We have more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over".

Do they?

There's a beautiful series of infographics over at Information is Beautiful titled How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (Kinda), that nicely illustrate the answer. In a word, no. The total explosive yield of all the world's nuclear weapons isn't nearly enough to destroy the whole inhabited surface of the world, let alone the world, let alone several times over.

This isn't to say that a global nuclear war wouldn't have unimaginably disastrous consequences. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR at the height of the Cold War would have been an unparalleled planetary disaster, resulting not only in the direct deaths of millions, but in widespread radioactive fallout and, in all probability, a nuclear winter.

In my mind, the recent studies that suggest even a small-scale nuclear exchange could cause a global environmental catastrophe are suspect. The Second World War saw massive bombing campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands and incinerated huge swaths of urban areas, but caused no notable climate effects. A similar instance was the predicted disastrous consequences of the oil well fires in Kuwait following the first Gulf War, which also seemed to ignore the experience of the Second World War. I'm not at all convinced that a small-scale nuclear exchange would have decisively more catastrophic effects. It would still, at the very least, be a horrible disaster for the populations involved.

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To understand why nuclear weapons can't actually destroy the world, it's absolutely vital to understand several things about them. In my experience, it's these misunderstandings that usually lead to a hugely inflated notion of their destructive capabilities.

Firstly, nuclear weapons effects do not increase geometrically with yield. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13-18 kt. It destroyed buildings in a 1.6 kilometer radius. From this, it's often erroneously assumed that a 100kt weapon would have 5-10 times that effect, and a 1Mt weapon would have 50-100 times the area of effect. This is far from true; a 1Mt weapon would cause severe fire damage out to a radius of approximately 10km, and complete destruction of urban areas to a radius of 2.4km. That's a big bang, but far from 50-100 times the actual destruction caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

After the several megaton range, effects decrease even more sharply relative to the yield. The 50Mt Tsar Bomba caused total destruction out to a 35km radius, not the 500km that a simple calculation from one-megaton explosions would suggest.

This, by the way, is why it annoys me when nuclear bomb yields are described in "Hiroshimas", as in a bomb having so-and-so many times the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It gives a totally misleading picture of the effects of the bomb in question.

Secondly, for nuclear weapons to destroy the world, they'd have to be targeted at the whole world. In other words, to get the most destructive area out of our nuclear weapons, we'd have to target them in order to maximize the damaged area. But in a real nuclear war, the targeting priorities would be completely different. It's assumed that some missiles won't make it, so all important targets will be targeted by several missiles. If all the warheads make it, overkill will result, meaning that some of the warheads won't even detonate at all. So for starters, a whole bunch of destructive power will be lost to a variety of causes like mechanical malfunctions and overkill.

This targeting also means that the nuclear weapon effects will be concentrated in a fairly small list of targets. In a Soviet-US nuclear exchange, missile bases, airbases and other military facilities, as well as cities, would have received far more than their "share" of nuclear destruction. So calculating the total area of the world our nuclear weapons could potentially damage is a totally theoretical number, since there is no plausible scenario in which nuclear weapons would be used for maximum area effect. That would require targeting a nation's nuclear arsenal all over the world, which, even in the context of full-scale nuclear war, would be completely insane. Nuclear warfighting plans have detailed, thought-out strategies for using nuclear weapons; they don't just say "press button - destroy world".

Even if we tried, we couldn't even destroy the total inhabited surface area of the world; and we're not even trying.

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The idea that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over is totally false. We don't. It's remotely possible that if we put our minds to it, i.e. combined the total nuclear arsenals of the world and made a concerted effort to use them to destroy human life, we might be able to kill everyone. Then again, if we persuaded everyone to walk off a cliff, that would do it as well.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous and frightening in their own right; there's no need to concoct these ridiculous "enough nukes to destroy the world 50 times over" myths to prove it.

Who's a skeptic?

Guardian: Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.

Apparently Lomborg has joined a fairly exclusive club. Mainly that of people with famous books that no-one seems to have actually read.

The only way anyone can say Lomborg has "changed his mind" about global warming is if they've never read his book in the first place. Contrary to what is usually reported, The Skeptical Environmentalist does not deny either global warming in general or anthropogenic global warming. In the Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg argued that while global warming is a very real problem, we need to be careful about what measures we take to fight it, as some of the policies being advocated to reduce CO2 emissions would end up costing us much more than unchecked global warming.

Of course, saying that we need to apply rational cost-benefit analysis to global warming was treated as heresy. The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, infamously compared Lomborg's views to Hitler's. He said, and I am not making this up:

What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s? You cannot treat people like cattle. You must respect the diversity of cultures on earth. Lomborg thinks of people like numbers. He thinks it would be cheaper just to evacuate people from the Maldives, rather than trying to prevent world sea levels from rising so that island groups like the Maldives or Tuvalu just disappear into the sea. But where’s the respect for people in that? People have a right to live and die in the place where their forefathers have lived and died. If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.

That's right, folks. Cost-benefit analysis is genocide.

As Lomborg himself says in the Guardian article:

Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."

The problem is that no-one has read the point he was making. The entire "environmentalist" movement had a knee-jerk reaction to Lomborg's book; all they saw was someone voicing the wrong opinion.

The level of journalism displayed by the Grauniad is just appalling. In the header, they refer to Lomborg as "the world's most high-profile climate change sceptic". He isn't a climate change skeptic at all, unless now "climate change skeptic" means anyone who doesn't agree with Al Gore.

I'm now going to do something that, apparently, the Guardian is incapable of: actually quote from Bjørn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Amazing, I know, but that's the kind of blog I run.

Summing up

Global warming has become the great environmental worry of our day. There is no doubt that mankind has influenced and is still increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and that this will influence temperature.

There's your climate change denial. What kind of idiots do they hire to write their articles?

The Environment: Nuclear power!

Last week, the Finnish government greenlit the construction of two new nuclear power plants. I consider this a signal victory for environmentalism and security.

First of all, this transforms the balance of payments of the Finnish electricity grid, so to speak. At the moment, Finland is more dependent on imported electricity than any other European country. Some of it comes from Scandinavia, but the majority of the electricity we import comes from Russia. That isn't a nice situation to be in for purposes of security policy. The new nuclear plants will end Finland's energy dependence on Russia.

Secondly, and much more importantly, they will finally allow Finland to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation, thus making the most important contribution to diminishing global warming that we can. As I explained earlier, power generation is the biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Predictably, the Finnish "environmental" movement is up in arms over this. The Green party, which is currently in government as part of a coalition, has protested strongly, but like they always do, has done nothing but protest. I thought I should address this, as opposing nuclear power is, to me, the most illogical and senseless part of the "environmental" movement.

Basically there are two kinds of renewable energy, "old renewables" (mainly hydroelectric power) and "new renewables" (solar, wind, tidal and geothermal energy, to name a few). Of these, we're utilizing hydroelectric power pretty much to its maximum extent. The ecological effects of dams are so profound that it's hard to see any developed countries building any more of them. As for the new renewables, at the moment, they're a pipe dream. They're the energy generation means of the future, sure, but that future is a long time and a gigantic investment in R&D and plant away. To stick with our example, Finland, at the moment none of the new renewables are cost-effective. All Finnish wind power generation runs at a net loss and must be heavily subsidized by the government.

To convert current electricity production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is, if not completely impossible, far too expensive to contemplate. In the alternative, our energy policy options are either continuing to burn fossil fuels or replacing them with nuclear power. With a (slowly) growing population and a growing economy, we can't very well reduce electricity consumption by the kind of amounts it would take to get rid of Finland's electricity deficit and stop using fossil fuels.

The safety hazards of nuclear power plants in normal operation are grossly exaggerated, but the problem of nuclear waste is real. Interestingly, the problem could be very much reduced if we used nuclear fuel more efficiently, but that's a topic for another time. However, nuclear waste is a much smaller problem than global warming. Anti-nuclear campaigners make much of the horror of leaving nuclear waste to future generations. What about leaving them a world that's at about the same temperature as this one? Surely the consequences of runaway global warming are infinitely worse than those of a very minute amount of nuclear waste?

It's this failure to prioritize that I find most galling about the current "environmental" movement, by which I mean Greenpeace and their ilk. The inordinate attention they pay to the problem of nuclear waste nicely obscures the greater problem: how will we generate electricity without using fossil fuels? I stress, again, that renewable energy sources like solar power are simply not practicable yet.

The only current alternative to building nuclear power is continuing to use fossil fuels. Not only does burning fossil fuels for electricity generation make the largest single human contribution to the greenhouse effect, but in normal, day-to-day operation, coal plants kill people. They produce air pollution that shortens the expected lifespan of everyone living around them.

So the question is, really: do we want to stick with a form of power generation that not only kills people through air pollution but also makes a huge contribution to global warming, or build nuclear power? By taking the latter route, Finland will be able to entirely stop burning fossil fuels for electricity generation. That is a huge step toward doing our part to mitigate the effects of global warming. And it's only possible with nuclear power.

At the same time, it must be done despite the active campaigning of Greenpeace and the Finnish green movement. In my opinion, their opposition to nuclear power is nothing more than a cheap popularity stunt to capitalize on technophobia and old Cold War-era fears of nuclear annihilation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear power. It's an excellent example of how the Green movement is no longer an environmental movement, because in this case, they are allocating considerable funds and energies toward fighting against the only form of power generation that does not contribute to global warming.

In short, while preaching the dangers of global warming, the Green movement opposes the phasing out of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. How is that environmentalism?

The Environment: carbon dioxide emissions

To start with, let's try to frame the problem.

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56.6% of total greenhouse gas emissions are CO2 emissions created by burning fossil fuels (IPCC, AR4, Figure 1.1b). According to the US Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, total world CO2 emissions in 2006 were 8230 million metric tons. This subdivides by type into 1521 mmt (million metric tons) from gaseous fuels, 3108 mmt from liquid fuels, 3193 mmt from solid fuels and some 400 mmt from cement production and gas flaring.

The IPCC's Working Group III, Assesment Report 4 (link):

The largest growth in CO2 emissions has come from the power generation and road transport sectors, with the industry, households and the service sector remaining at approximately the same levels between 1970 and 2004 (Figure 1.2). By 2004, CO2 emissions from power generation represented over 27% of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the power sector was by far its most important source. Following the sectoral breakdown adopted in this report (Chapters 4–10), in 2004 about 26% of GHG emissions were derived from energy supply (electricity and heat generation), about 19% from industry, 14% from agriculture, 17% from land use and land-use change, 13% from transport, 8% from the residential, commercial and
service sectors and 3% from waste (see Figure 1.3).
[IPCC III, AR4, 1.3.1]

Sources of direct global CO2 emissions in 2004 were as follows [IPCC III,AR4,1.3.1], in GT CO2/year:

Electricity plants: ~10 GT
Industry (excluding cement production): ~5 GT
Road transport: ~4.5 GT
Residential and service sectors: ~4 GT
Deforestation: ~3 GT
Other: ~2 GT*
Refineries etc. ~2 GT
International transport (incl. aviation and marine tpt): ~0.5 GT

(*: "Other domestic surface transport, non-energetic use of fuels, cement production and venting/flaring of gas from oil production)

10% of the emissions counted as deforestation are from burning wood as fuel.

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So in short, the most significant source of CO2 emissions is electricity generation, closely followed by industry and road transport. It's worth noting that that bugbear of the environmental movement, air travel, is way down on the list.

This strongly suggests, at least in my opinion, that any policy aiming at reducing CO2 emissions would need to focus on these areas.

The Environment: Energy policy, Obama style

BBC: Barack Obama eases offshore oil drilling ban

Oil firms could be given the chance to explore for reserves off the US coast for the first time in decades, under plans outlined by President Obama.

The White House says drilling will be allowed off Virginia and considered off much of the rest of the Atlantic coast.

The plans would overturn moratoriums on exploration put in place in the 1980s.

Analysts say the move, designed to cut dependency on foreign oil, is aimed at appeasing Republicans to help pass Mr Obama's climate-change proposals.

Here's a prime example of environmental policy. Yes, the United States is ridiculously dependent on oil. At the same time, its gigantic greenhouse gas emissions are contributing very powerfully to global warming. So what's the Obama administration's solution? Drill for more oil!

To make this case very briefly, in my opinion, the convergence of several trends offers a unique opportunity for true vision in politics. First, the sorry state of the American automobile industry. Secondly, increasing awareness of the strategic impacts of US dependency on imported oil. Third, increasing awareness of the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. President, how about doing something to address all these concerns at the same time? Don't invest in more oil; invest in hydrogen or electric vehicles to replace petroleum-driven cars. There is significant technology emerging in both: a hydrogen supply network is operating in LA today, and electric cars continue to take giant leaps forward. Making an investment in these forms of propulsion now could restore the US automobile industry to global leadership. And hey, you're basically the chairman of the board of every car company in the States except Ford anyway after the bailouts.

But instead, Mr. President, you make a little money letting people you don't know drill for oil. So much for green jobs, right?

I firmly believe that the biggest obstacle to fighting global warming is, at the end of the day, the unwillingness of governments to pay more than lip service to actually doing anything. Here's another example.

The Environment: Introduction

I made a post on my Finnish-language blog about how I thought Earth Hour was rubbish. Not because I don't believe in global warming or I don't believe we shouldn't be doing something about it, but because I firmly believe that trying to get people to switch their lights off is a horribly inefficient, even counterproductive way to mitigate global climate change.

So far, expressing that opinion has cost me one friend. Several other people have disagreed with me in less drastic ways, and I want to explore this issue further.

Around the same time, my good friend Aaro wrote in his blog about how overpopulation threatens the Earth: if we don't change our lifestyles, he says, our children will be "really screwed" by 2050 when the world's population may approach 11 billion. I also think he's being very silly, but we're still friends (I think!). Of course, just saying he's being silly isn't very constructive criticism.

These are by no means the only debates I find myself in on the topic of the environment. After all, these are complex issues we're talking about here. I and my co-bloggers want to properly address them, so we're starting a series of posts titled The Environment. We hope to cover several broad topics, including:

The limits to growth
Probably not the book, but the topic in general. What are the limits to the growth of the human population? Is overpopulation a real threat to the ecology of the planet and our welfare in it? Are we running out of resources?

Climate change
I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we agree that global warming is happening, and it is strongly affected by human greenhouse gas emissions. We want to look at this topic in some detail. How much greenhouse gas are we emitting? What human activities are contributing the most toward climate change? We may even take a brief foray into alternate history.

The forgotten environmental issues
It feels to me like most people today equate environmental issues with climate change. During the course of this series of posts, I also want to pay attention to some of the "forgotten" environmental issues. Even though global warming is very real, it doesn't mean that we can afford to ignore other pressing issues like overfishing and air pollution.

What can we do?
Interspersed with all this is the most interesting question: what are we going to do about all this? The ambitious goal of this series is to try to figure out what kind of environmental policies we should be advocating in our communities. Should we all become vegetarians? Should we participate in Earth Hour? How should we generate electricity?

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So, to sum up, this is the first post in a series under the label "The Environment". Over the coming months, several of us will be posting about a range of environmental topics. Our goal is to eventually create a series of summaries on the topics I've listed above. At first, the posts may be somewhat random, because we will do this using hypertext. Some of our first topics will be an overview of CO2 emissions, a look back at the Montréal Protocol that banned CFCs, and some hard limits on human population growth. We'll be working from the bottom up to put together a comprehensive look at the large issues. The first summaries will follow, um, later.

So stay tuned!

Some reading for the weekend

Reuters: Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice

H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness

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The Wall Street Journal: The War on Drugs Is a Failure

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Also, the latest in global warming alarmism, from the New Scientist:

How to survive the coming century

How unbiased is it? The author is called Gaia.

(I'm kidding, but they are being a bit extreme)

For instance:

"All of the world's major deserts are predicted to expand, with the Sahara reaching right into central Europe.

Glacial retreat will dry Europe's rivers from the Danube to the Rhine, with similar effects in mountainous regions including the Peruvian Andes, and the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, which as result will no longer supply water to Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Bhutan, India and Vietnam."

Is it just me, or does it seem like the author is saying Europe's river water comes from glaciers? The one link the article had anywhere near that was to an article that said no such thing. There seems to be some consensus that rainfall in Europe will decrease by as much as 20% in the worst case scenario, but that's nowhere near enough to "dry Europe's rivers". As with so many other impacts of climate change, the effect will be to increase rainfall in the winter and decrease it in the summer.

The idea that the Himalayas will "no longer supply water" is ludicrous. Maybe someone should explain to the author what a drainage basin is and where river water comes from. Yes, a significant portion of river water in summer comes from glaciers, and apparently in a worst-case scenario the Ganges may become a seasonal river, flowing only in the summer, but rivers will not vanish because of glacier retreat. They'll only vanish if rainfall stops completely.

After scaring you with overblown images of desertification, the author gets to the real point:

"In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution."

"If we use land, energy, food and water efficiently, our population has a chance of surviving - provided we have the time and willingness to adapt."

And the article goes on and on about what kind of a global planned economy we need to set up to "survive the coming century":

"We need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are, and then plan the population, food and energy production around that."

I have to write some more on environmentalist alarmism in the future, but the biggest reason articles like this make me highly sceptical is the effortless way in which the writers go from looking at the science of global warming to positing global fascism to deal with it. From the author's own website:

"The most obvious logical solution is to move the people where the resources are, and I explore this idea in a recent article. There are other options. How about enforced sterilization of people that have produced one child - this would immediately shrink the population?"

Um, because human population may decrease in the future, we should decrease it ourselves by force? Why not just advocate shooting people? One of the comments to the post hits right to the heart of this kind of thinking:

"Hi agree with limiting population growth - people should have to apply to have children, instead of it being everyones god given right. The world is being filled up with the ill-conceived offspring of degenerates and criminals, from families too large to already look after themselves."

Maybe a little extreme, but then again, James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia theory, basically agrees with him: 'humans will survive and be "culled and, I hope, refined."' Also, how does Ms. Vince imagine we would go about "moving people to where the resources are"? By force? What other way is there?

I'm not a global warming skeptic, and I'm not arguing global warming isn't happening. I'm arguing that I'm frightened by the possibilities of what might happen if global warming gets worse; I'm also frightened by the idea of the kind of people who write these articles getting to impose their ideas on the world.

The idea of "planning the world" in the way the article describes would require a total abandonment of many of our basic human rights and of representative government. Environmentalists try to justify this by saying it is necessary to the survival of our species. Somehow, eco-fascism doesn't seem like too extreme a word to describe these people.

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Finally, some old school Internet humor: Niilo Paasivirta